The Design and Styling of Technology-based Innovation. Theory and Practical cases

This paper addresses the design and styling of future products that are based on
innovative technologies. So how should a future electric personal mobility device look like? Or how will an electric vehicle charging station look and work with integrated photovoltaic solar cells? In general we wonder how we can create such designs that people are willing to incorporate new technologies in their daily lives. Because the way that new technologies are embodied in tangible products can have a lot of influence on the perception and adaptation of innovative technology-based products by the intended users. In this paper we propose guidance for the contemporary designer, in order to improve and facilitate the acceptance and domestication of such new technology. At least three complementing design principles play a role in this process; level of complexity, the combination of novelty and typicality, and the framing of meanings with associations and metaphors. This combination of design theories, called “innovative design & styling”, was implemented and tested within an IDE students’ master course “Sources of Innovation”. The initial results that we present here, show that the explicit application of the three design principles had a positive effect on the quality of the proposed design concepts.